Me,Myself and Gymming....

The following is an account of an insane decision. I decided to join a gym a couple of months back.
Let me introduce myself. I’m a tam Bram. We eat curd rice and are nice people. Exercise is one of the seven deadly sins and involves at the most pressing the buttons of a remote while flipping channels on the television. An intricate math problem? An uninvited discourse on Aristotle? We are the guys. Physical activity..u kidding?
So I was moving into hitherto uncharted territory when I decided to join the gym.
My Mom couldn’t have reacted more strongly if I said I was going to become a nudist. She stared at me open mouthed.” Gym? Do I feed you so that you can go and waste it waste it lifting funny contraptions? What if you become thin?”
One fine day feeling a bit like Christopher Columbus and having pushed my chest out a couple of nonexistent inches I walked into “Bodygrow”. Suitable pictures of men with nonexistent underpants and muscles jutting out at the unlikeliest angles adorned the walls.
All around me I saw big men with funny looking faces lifting a variety of heavy apparatus.
I nervously approached the biggest guy in the place assuming logically that he must be the instructor. He listened to me and critically looked me over frowning and shaking his head.
”LIFT, PUSH, JUMP” he suddenly bellowed.
I jumped out of my skin and nearly hit the ceiling.
Weakly catching on to a treadmill for support I stuttered”w...What?”
“What are you waiting for? Start lifting and pushing and jumping!”He growled.
Forcing my face into what I thought was a grin I backed away.
I was frowning in concentration, straining as I pulled at a weight. I contorted my face into a variety of expressions as I made an effort. Suddenly a hand tapped me from behind. I nearly went face first on the canvas. The abominable instructor man was back.
“Contort your face” He said. Assuming that he was instructing me on the procedures of facial exercise I pulled my face into an ugly distorted angle.
” Look into the mirror, he growled.
I looked, rather pleased at how ugly I had made my face.
“Do you want to be stuck with this face for life?”
Even though I rather thought it would make life exciting to go around with such a face I prudently remained silent.
” Do not contort your face while exercising. The facial muscles could stay that way forever.” He walked away after another of his hammer hits on my back
Suddenly I had a bright idea. I thoughtfully set my face into what I assumed was a handsome, appealing expression, assuming if my face was going to become a certain way due to contortion I would rather it be this face of mine. For the next ten minutes I exercised with that same expression staring straight ahead. With a start I suddenly realized a guy opposite me was staring at me with a strange expression. Suddenly he winked. I slowly straightened out the grin into a normal expression, hoping he would understand that I was not the brokeback mountain kind. Me and my big ideas.
I had no idea that there were girls in my gym till a day when a lovely damsel walked in. As she hopped and jumped in her pink tights I would discretely steal glances . Whenever she was around I would try to do spectacular things like lifting weights I would not normally dream of otherwise.
With what I thought was a spectacular amount of weight on the apparatus I lifted with an almost heroic expression on my face. After repeating it for a couple of times and when my back showed signs of breaking down, I got off the machine patting myself on the back for having suitably impressed the girl. The girl herself walked to the apparatus I had just got off and after clicking her tongue after seeing the weights, she casually added a couple more weights and started working the machine rapidly. When I was walking away with a downcast expression a smothered giggle added to my humiliation.
And yeah the pains. The first day after I had started working out the pains were terrible. The only particular consolation I could think of was that there was no specific spot that pained. It pained if I laughed, it pained when I breathed and damn it, it pained when I tried using the remote too.
It’s been two months now. I wish I had a “before” and “after “picture to show you like the tele shopping network. I know I don’t look like anything closely resembling Arnold of the terminator fame. But for the disbelieving I assure you under the clothes the muscles are in place.” Asta la vista baby” …I guess..!!!